The haggling continues in what could be the largest-ever tech acquisition.

On Wednesday afternoon Qualcomm, the world's largest maker of chips and processors for phones, said in a statement that potential buyer Broadcom had "made an inadequate offer even worse" when it lowered its buyout bid earlier in the day.

Broadcom, a maker of chips for everything from cable modems to set-top boxes to digital video recorders, had dropped its offer for Qualcomm to approximately $117 billion from the more than $121 billion it had named about two weeks back. That's because on Tuesday, Qualcomm had upped its own bid for another chipmaker, NXP Semiconductors, taking it to about $44 billion from an earlier price of $39 billion.

"Qualcomm's board acted against the best interests of its stockholders by unilaterally transferring excessive value to NXP's activist stockholders," Broadcom said in a statement announcing its reduced bid.

Qualcomm responded by saying its board had concluded that Qualcomm is far more valuable with NXP than without.